The First History
The Great Serpent paid the First History little mind. This History was open to it, as opposed to certain other Histories, and so it saw no need to bother with it any further. This lack of mindfulness kept it from being troubled by the other Hours to some extent, as there were more interesting Histories with more resources to plunder.
After the Segmenting of the Snake, the Bright-Delver took over the some of the work of the Great Serpent. While she was not as adept as her predecessor, she alone controlled the path which this History would take. While the War of the Doors raged, her chosen travelled from country to country, laying the seeds that would allow the occult to rise even further into prominence than it had ever before. The Delver specifically targeted artists and educators with her chosen, delighting in filling her ranks with those who had mastered their chosen art form or those who filled a hundred minds with ideas and light. The First History was to be a golden age, where all hearts were opened to the light of the Glory.
The First History sprouted forth many empires, rising and falling over the centuries like the tide, with only a few standing tall against the crashing waves of time. The first of them was the Kingdom of Albion, which rose from the petty kingdoms to unify the Isle of Britain.
This was the reign of the king known in some Histories as Arthur. When he had first conquered England, he and his councilors began the long and arduous task of ensuring the long-term stability of the realm. One of his advisors put his trust in spies and espionage, focusing his efforts on rooting out treachery and treason. After reaching the limits of mortal ability and faced with the king's planned invasion of Scotland, he turned to the Invisible Arts.
Mansus spirits slipped into the enemy's camps, raided their dreams, and killed them in their sleep. The invasion was successful, and the councilor went further, using the powers of an adept to ensure loyalty amongst the people. Even the king was not above suspicion, for what if he became a tyrant? Faced with the impossible task of ensuring the kingdom's perpetual survival, the advisor sacrificed his king to the Hours - specifically the ruler of the Mansus, the Great Serpent.
Eventually he rose to become a Name, taking on the role of the Great Serpent's vizier. When the Segmentation occurred, he rose higher, though never too high. Now the Vizier watches over the First History as one might watch their errant grandchild.
But with the death of its king, murdered at the hand of his most trusted advisor, Albion fell. New empires rose to take its place, and among them was the Holy Roman Empire, which spread rapidly and had conquered most of Western Europe, with only the Kingdom of England and their newly-united allies standing against them.
This was the time of Empress Irene and her Holy Servants, who aided her in her search for True Enlightenment. After discovering the barest glimpses of the occult written in foreign manuscripts and hidden amongst the pages of an even more ancient grimoire, seemingly from the beginning of history itself, she withdrew from the public eye - knowing that if she were to be discovered, it would be her head rolling along the cobbles.
In time, the Empress Irene would perform her rituals and enter through the Gate to the House of the Serpent, where she met with the strange squid-like figure of the Architeuthian. Her initial surprise and wonderment gave way to questions, and then to conversation and debate, as she spoke with this unknown entity. Irene would return often, and continue her conversations, gaining much more knowledge of the House Without Walls, as well as of the occult in general, often shirking her Empirical duties in exchange for these conversations. As mortals often do, Irene eventually sensed her time was nearing its end, and her intuition proved none too wrong. She began her final entry to the House of the Serpent, and vanished with her fonts of occult knowledge moments before her Holy Servants came knocking and demanding her resignation from the Crown, giving way for Charlemagne to take over and eventually spur on the downfall of the Holy Roman Empire.
Inside the House, however, Irene spoke her final rasping conversation with the Architeuthian, having a library and throne set beside the Aquarium that she may converse and exchange secrets at her leisure. Within mere moments, she breathed her last, leaving her soul full of occult knowledge to ascend her spirit to the rank of Long. Slumped upon her stone throne, the newly christened Aged Bones gathered ever more knowledge, and reminiscing on her limited time as the Empress in an attempt to examine her faults and her successes. Her capacity for retaining knowledge also applied to the histories, and as she gazed upon her former empire from above, she was able to see the much larger picture for the first time: empires spanning continents, kingdoms reaching ever further across territories, and their rulers taking both great victories and innumerable losses. Before long, her critical examinations led to her power growing, and the Aged Bones had soon ascended to Hour status in the absence of one who held such intimate knowledge of History's Legacy, and the changes therein.
Over the course of the next five histories, She-Who-Remembers would come to sculpt and mould the great nations of the world into glorious marks in the world's Tapestry of Legacies, amassing worshippers among the nobility and the throne-seekers hoping to weave their own tales to be ever-remembered in the skull of the Aged Bones.
The Delver does not abandon, and does not give in to despair. The loss of a thousand libraries, a billion souls, and all the horrors that had been visited on her work did not temper her optimism with caution. Perhaps her History had been reduced to the station of the Dark Ages once again, but that would never stop her. Once again, she throws herself into her work, and once again she intends for the First History to rise above all others. Perhaps this time, her efforts will succeed, and remain unthwarted by the machinations of the other Hours.
The Stargazing Society, that loosely-tied company of ambitious astronomers dedicated to the distant and enthralling Hours: The Glorious Lie, the Watcher in the Window, the Ferryman, the Star. In the First History, they possessed significant traction in the Land of the Reed-Plains, and were said to have disbanded in the late nineteenth century, after their leader had discovered ‘the bird’s feather-dress’, learning the secrets of flight and travel, and led his congregation to a space above the Earth, closer to the Sun.
